Workout Tracker

A personal workout tracker. Laravel REST API with a Vue 3 frontend on top of it.

I built this to practise designing an API properly instead of growing one controller at a time, which is how most of my earlier side projects went. Everything here started as a written spec before any code existed. Those specs are in specs/ if you want to see how it was planned.

What it does

Log your workouts and see whether you're actually progressing.

• Profile and body metrics over time
• An exercise library, with shared exercises plus your own private ones
• Routines, either built by hand or generated for a muscle group and difficulty
• Workout sessions, where you log sets and reps against the routine
• Analytics for training volume and personal records

How it's built

Backend is Laravel with a versioned /v1 API. Auth is Sanctum. The interesting part there is that token abilities are synced from the user's role permissions at login, so authorisation is on the token rather than being re-derived on every request.

Data access goes through repository interfaces in app/Repositories/Contracts, with Eloquent implementations behind them. Authorisation is in policies, validation is in form requests grouped by domain, and responses go through API resources. Controllers stay thin.

Frontend is Vue 3 with Inertia, in frontend/. Pages for routines, workouts, exercises, analytics and profile.

Tests are Pest feature tests covering registration, login, logout, the exercise library, workout plans and workout logs.

There's a Postman collection in backend/ covering every endpoint.

The decision I'd defend

Putting repository interfaces in front of Eloquent is arguable on a project this size. Laravel already gives you a decent data layer and the indirection costs you something.

I did it because I wanted the controllers and services to depend on something I define rather than on Eloquent's whole surface area, and because it makes the query logic a single place to look when it gets complicated. On a project this small it's more structure than strictly needed. On the systems I work on day to day it isn't.

Running it

cd backend
composer install
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate --seed
php artisan serve

cd ../frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Tests:

cd backend && ./vendor/bin/pest

What I'd do next

• Move the routine generator out of its controller and into a service. It's the one place in here doing real logic in the wrong layer.
• Docker Compose for the whole thing, and a CI workflow that runs the test suite on push.
• Analytics currently recalculates on every request. It should be cached.